INDUSTRIAL FORTEANA
There’s a distinct whiff of industry to proceedings this month, with three stories from England, the United States and Germany connected with the worlds of coal, iron and steel.
First, Paul Cropper – a long-time investigator of all sorts of strangeness, with a particular interest in poltergeist cases – returns to with the fascinating, if little-known, case of a stone-throwing polt in 19th century America. In the city of Akron, Ohio – a hive of heavy industrial activity – a family of German immigrants was subjected to a week-long bombardment of stones both outside and inside their home. Despite the presence of crowds of curiosity-seekers, police, numerous reporters (including one William Clemens, cousin to Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain) and a local priest, no satisfactory explanation for the mysterious stone-throwing was ever found. Suspicion, as so often in such cases, fell on nine-year-old Emma Metzler, but there was also talk of the 72-year-old grandmother being a witch. Even in a booming industrial city like Akron, patterns of belief from the old world were not uncommon.
